Supervisory control theory applied to swarm robotics

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Abstract

At present, most of the source code controlling swarm robotic systems is developed in an ad-hoc manner. This can make it difficult to maintain these systems and to guarantee that they will accomplish the desired behaviour.

Formal approaches can help to solve these issues. However, they do not usually guarantee that the final source code will match the modelled specification.

To address this problem, our research explores the application of formal approaches to both synthesise high-level controllers and automatically generate control software for a swarm of robots.

The formal approach used in this paper is the supervisory control theory. The approach is successfully validated in two experiments using up to 42 Kilobot robots and up to 26 e-puck robots.